Also among this week's comics...

FABLES #18 - The origin of the Fables' Smalltown, where all the little people live.  There's a part of me that bristles slightly at classifying characters from Gulliver's Travels as Fables, but then I suppose they all started off in fiction at some stage, and the Lilliputians are probably well known enough to qualify.  Willingham does seem to be using them with little regard for the political point that they were supposed to be making, but then I suppose that's fair enough given the story that he's trying to tell here.  Leaving aside that grumble, it's another nice little exercise in building a new story around existing characters who weren't meant to be together.  Worth a look if you're not already buying this series, since it's a self-contained story.  B

IRON MAN #73 - The first issue for John Jackson Miller and Jorge Lucas, with the rather bizarre remit to get Iron Man into office as the US Secretary of Defense.  (If you're wondering what happened to the last one, his initials were DR and Avengers revealed that he was an evil Nazi.  Ah, politics.)  Of course, there's a practical problem here because Tony Stark gave up any involvement in munitions years ago on a point of principle.  Cue much angsting in an attempt to disentangle Stark from this decades-old plot before plugging him into the new one.  And it's okay.  Nothing to write home about, but it does at least manage to fulfil its remit without looking totally stupid.  I have enormous trouble seeing how this storyline can be made to work without getting into party politics (which could be particularly problematic considering that there's an election next year), so I'll keep an eye out to see how they're planning to address this.  In the meantime, this doesn't really answer the points that interest me.  B-

VENOM #5 - That's... it?  Five sodding issues to establish that Venom is dangerous, he's escaped, and somebody's trying to get him back?  For christ's sake.  Decompressed storytelling is one thing, but at this speed Venom seems determined to produce the world's first decompressed trade paperback.  Come back in six months for volume 2, when Venom will spend five issues walking to the shops to buy some teabags.  In volume 3, he walks back.  Seriously, I get that they're trying to go for horror and atmosphere here, but it just isn't working.  It's too damn slow.  C-

There's a new Article 10 up at Ninth Art.

Next week, the final issue of Agent X; more of the Fantastic Four in Exiles; the start of a new storyline in Mystique; Planet X continues in New X-Men; new arcs begin in Weapon X and Wolverine; and X-Treme X-Men continues the Intifada arc.

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